Joad Raymond

Milton's Paradise Lost, the most eloquent, most intellectually daring, most learned, and most sublime poem in the English language, is a poem about angels. It is told by and of angels; it relies upon their conflicts, communications, and miscommunications. They are the creatures of Milton's narrative, through which he sets the Fall of humankind against a cosmic background. Milton's angels are real beings, and the stories he tells about them rely on his understanding of what they were and how they acted. While he was unique in the sublimity of his imaginative rendering of angels, he was not alone in writing about them. Several early-modern English poets wrote epics that explore the actions of and grounds of knowledge about angels. Angels were intimately linked to theories of representation, and theology could be a creative force. Natural philosophers and theologians too found it interesting or necessary to explore angel doctrine. Angels did not disappear in Reformation theology: though centuries of Catholic traditions were stripped away, Protestants used them in inventive ways, adapting tradition to new doctrines and to shifting perceptions of the world. Angels continued to inhabit all kinds of writing, and shape the experience and understanding of the world. Milton's Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination explores the fate of angels in Reformation Britain, and shows how and why Paradise Lost is a poem about angels that is both shockingly literal and sublimely imaginative.

The Early-Modern Imagination

Milton's Angels

Christine Bold

Gary Kelly

"Devoted to the exploration of popular print culture in English from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the present."--Provided by publisher.

Volume Six: US Popular Print Culture 1860-1920

The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture

Between 1600 and 1800 newspapers and periodicals moved to the centre of British culture and society. This volume offers a series of perspectives on the developing relations between news, its material forms, gender, advertising, drama, medicine, national identity, the book trade and public opinion.

News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain

Noah Moxham

In News Networks 35 scholars from 10 countries give a new account of the history of European news, emphasising its transnational character and the international transmission of forms and modes of news as well as information.

News Networks in Early Modern Europe

Jeroen Salman

Roeland Harms

This collection explores the surprising ways by which cheap print moved across Europe, focussing on Italy, the Netherlands and Britain. Looking at pedlars, commerce and communication, it presents a model of textual dissemination and the material and economic premises of European landscapes of print.

The Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500-1820

Not Dead Things

This collection offers a new and compelling vision of the place of angels in medieval and early modern Europe. Through literal and figurative conversations with angels, humans acquired or imagined new forms of knowledge and new understandings of the relationship between God and man and of the arrangement of the natural world. By looking at these conversations, the authors, from many disciplines, recover lost perspectives on the social and cultural histories of theology, magic, natural philosophy, music and literature in medieval and early modern Europe. The essays explore points of convergence among the disciplines and between medieval and Renaissance theology, natural philosophy, politics and imaginative culture. They restore to angels some of the intellectual vitality and cultural substance that recent centuries have taken away, and bring angels closer to humans

Joad Raymond

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